Social care is all about care and support for the elderly, disabled or the sick. These services are availed to anyone and background does not matter. There is somebody who is assigned to help you out.
What are care and support services?
Care and support services, also known as social care services, help people who are in need of practical support due to illness, disability, old age or a low income.
Care and support services could include having a personal assistant to help you around the home, structural changes to help you move around or manage in your house, or even an alarm system so that you can call for help if you have a fall.
Social care services are available to everyone, regardless of their background.
However, social care is subject to rules about your needs and ability. Services can also support the families or carers of people who receive social care. Find out more about your rights and entitlements to social care.
Sourced from:http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/social-care-and-support-guide/Pages/what-is-social-care.aspx
Social care is not done well. The main problem is that it is underfunded. There are so many people who need help but the money needed is scarce.
The crisis in social care funding
One in ten people over the age of 50 are not having their care needs met. Around 1.5 million people in the UK are providing over 50 hours per week of unpaid care. The UK is heading towards the bottom of the OECD league table for spending on care as proportion of GDP. These are just a few of the worrying figures on adult social care in a report, produced by the International Longevity Centre (ILC-UK), ominously titled The end of formal adult social care?
If there is one thing that everyone – from politicians to health care professionals to academics – agrees on it is that adult social care is severely under funded. And if there is a second thing, it is that the problem is only going to get worse. The longer we live, the more support we need; the more support we need, the more money social care services require to function.
Sourced from:http://www.localgov.co.uk/The-crisis-in-social-care-funding/40094
The crisis in the social care sector should be sorted as soon as possible as it is tampering even with the quality of services provided. This is because social carers are underpaid and overworked.
Social workers in the UK are over-worked, under-supported but mostly satisfied with their jobs, according to exclusive research carried out by Community Care in association with Unison.
The average social worker among the near-1,400 respondents to our survey worked 41 hours a week, against a contracted 35 hours, while less than half thought their quality of supervision and decision support was good.
Only a quarter said their caseloads were good or excellent, while 37% said their promotion prospects were poor, but 16% were very satisfied in their job and 55% were fairly satisfied.
Sourced from:http://www.communitycare.co.uk/2009/07/28/social-workers-say-we-are-underpaid-and-over-worked/
